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Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal, but became an atheist at 13, although at times he was a serious cultural Jew.[1] His father, Harry, a trained lawyer, first worked as a travelling salesman, whilst his mother, Roslyn, was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. His sister, Susan, a child psychologist by training, is now a journalist and columnist, and his brother, Robert, is a policy analyst with the Canadian government.

He married the clinical psychologist Nancy Etcoff in 1980, but divorced in 1992. In 1995, Pinker married Malaysian-born cognitive psychologist Ilavenil Subbiah, but they also later divorced. His current girlfriend, Rebecca Goldstein, is a professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.[2] Pinker has no children.

Pinker received a first class bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. Pinker is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard having previously been the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty.[3]

Pinker's books How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate are seminal works of modern evolutionary psychology, which views the mind as a kind of swiss-army knife equipped by evolution with a set of specialized tools (or modules) to deal with problems faced by our Palaeocene ancestors. Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists believe the human mind evolved by natural selection just like other body parts. This view, pioneered as a field by E. O. Wilson, and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby - is pursued under evolutionary psychology and is a rapidly growing research paradigm, especially among cognitive psychologists.

Critics allege Pinker's books ignore or dismiss opposing evidence. In "Words and Rules," for example, he describes cognitive scientists as having dropped a competing model "like a hot potato" after his widely cited criticism.[How to reference and link to summary or text] If anything, that opposing view, Connectionism, remains as popular as ever and the ongoing dispute does not appear to be heading towards any sort of resolution.[How to reference and link to summary or text] Other critics (see Edward Oakes's review in the External links) claim that Pinker may be a little too good a writer in being able to combine several weakly based hypotheses into a plausible-sounding "evolutionary psychology" story that in reality may be no more scientific than a Rudyard Kipling "Just So" story.